books.google.co.uk - This is the seventh volume of The Public Sculpture of Britain, a series intended to cover eventually the whole of the country and produced by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. The City of London, by the end of the seventeenth century, was already by far the most important centre of trade...https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Public_Sculpture_of_the_City_of_London.html?id=KiK0DbcUBIUC&utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePublic Sculpture of the City of London

Public Sculpture of the City of London

This is the seventh volume of The Public Sculpture of Britain, a series intended to cover eventually the whole of the country and produced by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association. The City of London, by the end of the seventeenth century, was already by far the most important centre of trade and finance in the world. This financial and commercial supremacy was also reflected in some of the most impressive architecture and public sculpture of the last 300 years. The Monument of 1671-6, commemorating the Great Fire of 1666, is still the largest column ever erected in Britain and historically so famous that it needs no other words to identify it. The City owed its success in large part to the care that it bestowed on foreign finance and financiers and therefore it is appropriate that, while Francis Chantrey's ceremonial equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington stands in front of the Royal Exchange, behind that great building can be found a fountain with a tender but still heroic nursing mother modelled by Jules Dalou. The Institute of Chartered Accountants building is well known for its friezes uniting architecture and sculpture in the best tradition of the New Sculpture.